Jharkhand villagers cover homes with LED lights to keep rampaging elephants at bay
Dazzling lights keep them away since they blur their vision, forest official says
Patna: Anxious villagers in Jharkhand are lighting up their homes with LED bulbs to save themselves from recurring attacks from rampaging elephants.
Residents of Semartand village in Jharkhand’s Garhawa district have hung LED bulbs around their homes, on trees and on bamboo poles in the entire village to produce abundant dazzling light during night.
They say the elephants raid the village only when it is covered in darkness and hence they are working overtime to keep their village illuminated at night.
“Elephants had been regularly raiding our homes at night and eating away our grain stocks. So we decided to keep our village illuminated with dazzling lights,” a local resident Ramesh Munda told the local media.
He added the elephants have not entered their village right since they lighted their village with LED bulbs.
Alarm raised
Villagers said the elephants have raided their homes many times. Only recently, a herd of elephants raided the house of Awadhesh Singh and ate away quintals of paddy seeds. What was interesting, the elephants also took away sacks of paddy with the help of their tusks after the villagers raised an alarm.
The tuskers repeated the same act at nearby Kushwar village when they carried bundles of harvested paddy crop stored at a barn with the help of tusks after feasting on the grains.
“Dazzling lights keep the elephants away since they blur their vision. However, fox lights are more effective then the LED bulbs,” local divisional forest official Abhirup Sinha said.
Villagers turned to this trick after high intensity dazzling lights fitted in at least 50 villages of several districts have kept the tuskers away and put a check on human-elephant conflicts. Officials said more than 450 solar lights have been installed in forest areas of Jamshedpur alone while several villages in Simdega, Bokaro and Deoghar districts were provided with enough lighting arrangements to prevent the elephants entering the village. According to forest officials high intensity dazzling lights affect the vision of the elephants.
The raing conflicts between humans and elephants have killed 1,405 people in Jharkhand in 20 years. This means an average 70 people are getting killed by tuskers every year.